Thursday, September 29, 2016

Covenant of Revelation Defended

So I’ve just released my book, The Covenant of Revelation, and it appears to have a rather
simplistic take on the Bible—so much so that I feel a little embarrassed about
it, actually. In this short blog post I wanted to write a defense for it to
show you the logical structure that underpins the book.

Foundational Premise: God does all things for His glory.

To assert this is nothing more than to assert that God has
volitions and a plan for creation. In other words, He’s a rational actor. I
take this premise as both foundational and self-evident, and as such I feel no
need to justify it.

I will say in passing however that the strength of this premise
is seen when you try to invert it. So if the statement “God does everything for
His glory” is false, then “God doesn’t
do everything for His glory” is true. But what specifically doesn’t He do for
His glory? Does He do some things to establish and spread glory, and some things
to sabotage and undermine it? Or say the things He doesn’t do for His glory are
neutral, that is, sometimes He’s about the business of His glory, and sometimes
He’s busy doing other things. What are those other things? Increasing our love
for Him? That brings Him glory. So not only is the negative of this statement
absurd, I can’t even conceive of what it
means. Which may speak to a limited intelligence on my part, admittedly, or
it may speak to the validity of the premise.

Corollary : God created the universe to glorify Himself.

No surprises right? The creation of the universe is a subset
of the category “all things done.” We might also restate this corollary as: God glorifies Himself by revealing Himself
to the universe He’s created without much fuss either.
I like putting it that way because makes it easier to see the consequence that
God is about the business of unveiling His nature, attributes, desires,
abilities, thoughts, and heart to the world—which was the reason He created in
the first place.It also allows for the follow on statement: the Bible was breathed out by God for His
glory. Which can be reshaped to: The
Bible was given to glorify God by revealing Him.

Now if this is true, (and I think it is) then there are
certain logical conclusions that must inevitably follow.

Conclusion 1: The Bible is designed to reveal Christ.

Conclusion 2: The Bible is about Christ

Corollary to Conclusion 2: the things in the Bible are about
Christ.

Which means: “the covenants in the Bible are about Christ”
or “the covenants in the Bible were given to reveal Christ to the world.” So
far so good? Nothing spectacular about any of these statements right? Wrong.
Conclusion 2 is absolutely devastating to ordinary
evangelical theology. It’s checkmate in 7 for the mainstream opinion. Or if
you’re not into chess it’s the Arizona Rangers big iron going Bang! For if the covenants are about
Christ then the new covenant has to be about Christ too, and the stool which
Baptist theology rests on gets the legs kicked off at that point.
The book is the proof of this.